Some Josef Pieper Quotes

[Dear Substack Reader, I know I promised my next post would be part II of Cicero’s Republic, but I was inspired by one subscriber, Truman Angell, to dig out some Josef Pieper quotes, especially regarding the virtues. Here’s Pieper on the unity of the virtues:

First, the Christian is one who, in faith, becomes aware of the reality of the triune God. Second: the Christian strives, in hope, for the total fulfillment of his being in eternal life. Third: the Christian directs himself, in the divine virtue of love, to an affirmation of God and neighbor that surpasses the power of any natural love. Fourth: the Christian is prudent; namely, he does not allow his view on reality to be controlled by the Yes or No of his will, but rather he makes this Yes or No of the will dependent upon the truth of things. Fifth: the Christian is just; that is, he is able to live “with the other” in truth; he sees himself as a member among members of the Church, of the people, and of any community. Sixth: the Christian is brave, that is, he is prepared to suffer injury and, if need be, death for the truth and for the realization of justice. Seventh: the Christian is temperate; namely, he does not permit his desire to possess and his desire for pleasure to become destructive and inimical to his being.

In other news, I’ve been doing a number of podcasts about the new Declaration of Independence book. And, I’ve been having a blast. I’ll post these as they happen. The most recent one was with my great friend, Ben Jones and his 605 Podcast. I’m not quite sure how to link it—as it’s up on Apple’s podcasts.

Here’s the Facebook link. I hope this gets you there. It was a wonderful interview.

I want to continue to take from Pieper. Below are my favorite quotes from a favorite book, The End of Time.

Ok, everyone, please know you are always in my prayers. Yours, Brad]

Notes on Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History (1954; Ignatius Press, 1999).

Aristotle was still able to hold the opinion that the process of history, like that of nature, is a cycle that continually repeats itself—so much so that, as he explicitly states, even men’s opinions are identically repeated, “not once or twice, not a few times, but an infinite number of times”. It is no longer possible however, post Christum natum, seriously to think thus. We can “omit” neither the concept of the beginning, of the creation out of nothingness (nor this concept of nothingness itself, which is the truly radical one), nor the concept of the end. This, it seems to me, is to be numbered among the changes that entered into the world of man on the basis of the event “revelation in Christ”. Page 13

The history of man—this is rather the unique commingling of free decision and fate; the encounters which fall to his lot in this unrepeatable moment of fife; man’s “path”, insofar as it is determined by his particular response to what destiny causes to befall him (whether this is a beloved person, a teacher, an antagonist or the gain or loss of possessions, health, beauty, or the innate gift of aptitudes, temperament, “constitution”). The concepts associated with the essential nature of history are freedom, decision, uniqueness, unrepeatability, un-interchangeability, unpredictable capacity for variation, the individually solitary; by these, historical happening is distinguished from the unhistorical happening of nature. Because this is so, however, because history is not simply the “unfolding” of something previously given that was not yet unfolded, because it is not simply “development”—for this reason, in the sphere of history the concretely future cannot be calculated in advance, neither by the stars nor by statistics. Page 33

I experience things as being knowable, penetrable, accessible to the human cognitive faculty. This fact, however, that things can be “entered upon” in cognition and by the person exercising cognition (a fact which is undoubtedly given in things themselves!)—this fact becomes really apprehensible in its core only when it enters the beam of light of the revealed word, namely, that of the Logos, in whom all things have their source. This word states that the inner manifestness, accessibility, lucidity of things has flowed into them out of the creative knowledge of the Divine Logos, simultaneously with their being, indeed as their being itself; and that it is this lucidity, stemming from the Logos, through which things become perceptible to human cognition; and that in this sense, according to the magnificently simple formulation of Thomas Aquinas, “the reality of things themselves is their light.”19 Undoubtedly, therefore, when I reflect upon this structure of things, their knowability, their “truth”, their luminosity, I am looking the things themselves in the face; the direction of my gaze is toward the reality before my eyes; but it is equally certain that I should not descry this inmost disposition of existent things if they did not he in the light of the Logos, by which everything was made in the beginning, which shines down, as it were, from behind my back, over my shoulder. Hence what is involved here is certainly an intelligere, a perception in the encounter with things—but it is an intelligere grounded on a credere. Pages 54-55

Every creature is, of itself, capable of being brought back into nothingness; more accurately speaking, the creature is, of itself, incapable of persisting in being. Page 61

It is, therefore, this realm of the untemporal-eternal upon which human history, that happens through time, continually and immediately borders. The expression “borders upon” is, of course, far too weak, indeed positively inapt: the temporal is inwardly sustained, saturated, pervaded by the untemporal. Because of this, the gaze of the man philosophizing about history does in truth fall, as it were, into a chasm (the same thing, however, happens in all philosophizing, in all reflective contemplation, whether it is revelation or historical reality itself that is contemplated—insofar, of course, as the inquiry is directed upon their roots!). Page 69

Should we not, on the contrary, concur with the diagnosis of Christopher Dawson, who, in respect of this coordination of technology and culture, says: “We have entered on a new phase of culture . . . in which the most amazing perfection of scientific technique is being devoted to purely ephemeral objects—It is obvious that a civilization of this kind holds no promise for the future save that of social disintegration.” In this utterance the present’s real sense of the future is speaking. It already announced itself in far-seeing figures like the Spaniard Donoso Cortes, who in 1849 said: “Mankind is hastening with great strides toward the certain fate of despotism. . . This despotism will evolve a power of destruction greater and mightier than anything we have heretofore experienced” (January 4, 1849). The aged Jacob Burckhardt could also be named. Likewise John Henry Newman, who speaks in a letter of the “great prophesying” of a friend, which is apparently beginning to reach fulfillment: “He asked, who would be the Goths and Vandals destined to destroy modern civilization. . . . He gave himself the following answer: The lowest class, which is very great in numbers and unbelieving, will rise up out of the depths of modem cities and be the new scourge of God” (autumn 1871). The great Vladimir Solovyev in his last book, Three Conversations from the year 1900: “I am of the opinion that progress, that is, noticeably accelerated progress, is always a symptom of the end”; the same book contains the “Narration concerning the Anti-christ”, of which we shall have more to say later; in it there occurs a well-aimed remark concerning the century “which was so advanced that it was even vouchsafed it to be the last”. Theodor Haecker prefaced his book Virgil, the Father of the West, which first appeared in 1931, with the terrifying epigraph: “In times like these, my friends, let us consider before it is too late what we shall take with us out of the horrors of desolation. Well, then, as Aeneas took first the penates, so we shall take first the cross, whose sign we can still make before it crushes us. And, then, well, whatever each of us loves most dearly. But let us not forget our Virgil, that goes into a jacket pocket.” Pages 75-76

All the same, in the revealed prophecy of the end of history a catastrophic end within history is foretold. Whoever believingly accepts this prophecy, that is to say, whoever takes it to be revelation, has no possibility of ignoring the fact that the end of Time, within history, will be a downfall, a catastrophe. Nonetheless, his attitude to history, his attitude to the future, may not be one of despair—and this for reasons arising out of that very same faith. The hope of him who thus believes, of him who believes in the “transposition” as deliverance, is by no means a hope directed purely upon the “beyond”. It is, rather, a hope that renders the believer able and willing to act here and now, within history, indeed even to see in the midst of the catastrophe itself a possibility of meaningful action within history. Admittedly, this attitude, as really lived, can flourish only on the soil of that believing understanding of the end of Time—an end which, although catastrophic, does not mean disaster. Pages 78-79

This is true, for instance, of Herder, who attacked Iselin and yet himself says: “By the laws of their inner nature, with the passage of ages, reason and equity must gain ground among men and foster an enduring humanity.” Now this idea of an “everlasting advance of our kind” (Fichte) is ubiquitous; it dominated European thought and evoked “all the ardour and faith of a genuine religion”. Whether Kant speaks of a realm of true culture and perpetual peace (although Kant, being a truly great thinker, also discerned the counterpart of this idea—of which more will be said later); whether Friedrich Engels prophesies that an organization of production will come, “in which productive labour, instead of being a means to the subjection of men, will become a means to their emancipation, by giving each individual the opportunity to develop and exercise all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions; in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of a burden”; whether Kalinin says, in a speech in 1933, that mankind is approximating, in the measure of Communist reconstruction, “more and more to a new, really human society, with which history first really begins and understanding guides the world”; whether, finally, the Atlantic Charter speaks of a peace “which shall guarantee that all men in all countries can live the whole of their lives free from fear and want”—in all these formulations the common idea of progress within history is still alive. This idea expresses the opinion that the historical process itself, with greater or lesser necessity, but in any case on the basis of forces operating within history, is leading to an end-situation “in which all demands of a religious, moral, artistic, economic, and political nature are mlfilled”. All these opinions rest upon the dissolution of the Christian view of history, from which the element of the catastrophic end within history has been expunged, while the notion of a “City of God” outside Time has been completely inverted to reemerge as the concept of an ideal social condition which can be realized within Time through cultural, political, and economic progress (or, as Stalin36 reformulated this bourgeois term: forward march). Pages 89-91

This is the last sentence of the whole essay. The mingling of biblical, more exactly spoken Apocalyptic, ideas with “enlightened” notions and valuations is here so singular that it seems necessary to pause and consider this last passage. What does it actually say? It says: Christianity will (possibly) forfeit the sympathy of men by losing the lovableness specific to it, in other words, by being untrue to its own essential nature. The Apocalypse (and the New Testament as a whole) states exactly the reverse: The Church forfeits the sympathy of the overwhelming majority by the unadulterated realization of her essential nature. To be consistent, Kant would have to say that the “great apostasy” of men who turn away from this degenerate Christianity is right. In the Apocalypse, the mass flight from the Church appears almost a confirmation of her truth; for the thought of the Enlightenment, it is, of course, an unthinkable idea that the truth may be fought although, or indeed because, it is the truth. Let us reconsider for an instant Kant’s discrimination between “ecclesiastical creed” and “religion of Reason”: The approach of the Kingdom of God on earth consists in the suppression of ecclesiastical creed by the religion of Reason—must not the contrary movement, then, the suppression of the religion of Reason by ecclesiastical creed, appear, conversely, as the approach of the Antichrist? This is not merely an abstractly proximate, or even an inescapable, consequence. Kant made the following explicit formulation: In that priests “make observances and historical belief an essential duty” (by these he means public worship, sacrament, and belief in the events of the history of salvation), instead of “taking to heart ethical principles”, they are doing “what is required to introduce him (the Antichrist)”.61 Thus the Antichrist appears as a positively ecclesiastical figure! Nevertheless, he is still under discussion, for the last time in the context of the philosophy of history; until now, quite recently . . . an awkward and embarrassed silence having reigned throughout the whole of the nineteenth century up to the threshold of this present moment—the possibility is discussed, in all seriousness and by no means “rapturously”, that “a world organization might become the most deadly and impregnable of tyrannies, the final establishment of the reign of anti-Christ.” Pages 107-108

Here, as Donoso Cortes put it, lies a special opportunity for periods of catastrophe: Ages of uncertainty are those in which one experiences the greatest certainty of how one stands vis-à-vis the world. Page 117

The name “Antichrist” may at first ring strangely on the modern ear. The meaning of this name in terms of historical reality is, however, very familiar to the contemporary man—to the contemporary man, which does not mean every man who is alive today on earth; it means whoever has observed and shared the experience of the most recently past events of human history (the totalitarian regime, “total war” and its concomitants) with awakened senses and from within. That familiarity, which it will be easy to demonstrate, is something new. In the spiritual history of “modern times”, the notion of the Antichrist has met with the same fate as the whole notion of a catastrophic end-situation within history. It was looked upon as something belonging simply to the “Dark Ages”. Page 119

We understand nothing about the Antichrist if we do not see him, despite all his power within history, as one who is fundamentally already defeated. Page 124

Just as the martyr, historically speaking, is a figure of the political order, so, too, the Antichrist is a phenomenon of the political sphere. The Antichrist is not something resembling a “heretic”, who is of importance only to ecclesiastical history and to whom the rest of the world need pay no attention whatever. Potentia saecularis, worldly power—this, says Thomas, is the specific instrument of the Antichrist; he is a worldly potentate. Tyrants, in their persecutions of the Church, Thomas states further, are prototypes (quasi figura) of the Antichrist. The latter, then, is not conceived as a phenomenon on the brink of the historical field; rather is the Antichrist, insofar as history is primarily political history, an eminently historical figure. This also implies that the End will not be chaos in the sense that the opposition and conflict between numbers of historical powers will cause a progressive dissolution of historical ties and structures and, finally, putrefaction. On the contrary, the End will be characterized by one single governmental structure equipped with prodigious power, which, however, fails to establish any genuine order. At the end of history there will be a pseudo-order maintained in being by the exercise of power. Nihilism, because, unlike anarchism, it is distinguished by a “relationship to order”, “is more difficult to see through, better camouflaged”—this perspicacious observation, contained in the diagnosis of Ernst Junger, holds a very strong, though concealed, eschatological reference. The description “pseudo-order” is also valid in the sense that the “illusion” is successful; it is an element in the prophecy of the End that the “desert of order” of the Antichrist will be regarded as a true and authentic order. The notion of a purely organizational social integument, in which everything “technological”, from the production of goods to hygiene, “functions smoothly” and which is nevertheless fundamentally a phenomenon of disorder, is not very remote from contemporary experience. Perhaps the pseudo-order of the Dominion of the Antichrist, after a “period of chaos” on a vast scale, such as, in Toynbee’s view, always precedes the establishment of a universal State, will be greeted as a deliverance (which would exactly confirm the character of the Antichrist as a pseudo-Christ). The Antichrist is to be conceived as a figure exercising political power over the whole of mankind; as a world ruler. Once, and as soon as, world dominion in the full sense has become possible, the Antichrist has become possible. To this corresponds the other, coordinate fact that the Christian gospel must have reached the totality of the peoples of the earth, who have been rendered accessible to it politically: “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Mt 24:15)—which is not construed by theology to mean that the Christian religion will spread in triumph over the whole earth but that the decision for or against Christ will become possible (or urgent) over the whole globe. Here a misunderstanding must be eliminated: The traditional doctrine of the Antichrist does not include any possibility of knowing the date of the end of time; nor does it state that there can be no world dominion save that of the Antichrist! The establishment of a World State, which is today well within the bounds of historical possibility, may quite possibly come to be looked upon as a legitimate goal of political endeavor. What this doctrine does state is that once this step has been taken, mankind will find itself in a condition in which the Dominion of the Antichrist has become more acutely possible than ever before: “a world organization might become the most deadly and impregnable of tyrannies, the final establishment of the reign of anti-Christ” (we have quoted this once before). Seen from this angle, another pronouncement concerning the Antichrist, likewise contained in tradition, takes on a special appearance. The Antichrist will realize upon the earth a prodigious increase of power, and that not only extensively, but also intensively. The World State of the Antichrist will be in the extreme sense a totalitarian State. This is determined, however, not only by the lust for power and the superbia of the Antichrist, but at the same time by the nature of the World State itself. To become overnight a totalitarian State—that is the inner peril, arising directly out of its very structure, that threatens a World Empire, which, per definitionem, is devoid of neighbors and thereby unexpectedly conforms to the political islands of the Utopias. Thus the liberal Gibbon said of the Imperium Romanum that within it freedom could have been torn up by the roots “because there was no possibility of flight”; “if dominion fell into the hands of one individual, the world became a safe prison for his adversaries.” To this a diary of the last war adds the conclusion that the objection can be raised to the “unitary organization of the world”, which is certainly imminent, “from the standpoint of liberty, that it will leave no place to which one might emigrate”. The Kantian ideal of the abolition of truly ‘external’ wars, which would be attained in a World State, has its reverse side: the place of external wars should be taken by internal ‘police actions,’ the character of which would approximate very closely to the extermination of pests. This tendency of a world organization to become “totalitarian’ in consequence of its structure, has been frequently characterized—the evaluation given to it having been just as often positive as negative. There is “Lenin’s dictum: ‘The Whole of society will be one office and one factory, with the same work and the same wages.’